In retrospect, even Napster lawyer David Boies' admission last year to Time magazine that the company had a 50-50 chance in court -- seen as a stunning statement of concession by most legal analysts -- today seems rather brash. After all, the likelihood of a Napster victory is and always was zero.

That's not to say the recording industry presents a sympathetic or particularly believable victim. Many observers say the downturn in record sales that the RIAA has laid at Napster's doorstep is probably attributable to other factors entirely, in particular the generally shoddy product peddled by the major labels. Plus, there's strong anecdotal evidence that most music-swappers use Napster to preview tunes or make mixed tapes, not to create track-by-track replicas of entire albums. If that's true, it suggests that Napster plays a role in the music business similar to pop radio -- far from hurting record sales, it might actually boost them over time.

But the crux of that argument -- that Napster makes music available for "substantial non-infringing uses" -- hasn't proved effective in court. And it shouldn't. Because the fact remains that Napster, however humble or quixotic its beginnings, is today a big, successful company whose primary business -- or at least its primary side-effect -- involves the large-scale circumvention of music copyright laws.

Copyright infringement was the implicit intent of the company and its software even back when the service was used by a few thousand, instead of many million, people. Far from representing the small, close-knit group of "friends and family" allowed under the Audio Home Recording Act, the early Napster community was from the start a far-flung network of strangers bootlegging copyrighted music files for anyone with a quick modem and the right software. Now that Napster is a household name the world over and an unregulated conduit for almost every scrap of recorded music known to man, even the service's most ardent supporters are hard-pressed to argue its activities don't amount to anything less than a wholesale disregard for the idea of intellectual property.

Apparently, though, few people beyond musicians and record industry executives have a problem with that. In fact, many in the peer-to-peer music swapping movement see themselves -- and, by extension, Napster -- as a confederation of modern-day Robin Hoods, sticking it to the robber barons who they view as the ultimate beneficiaries of industry royalties. It's an attitude that's galling to many artists and record companies, especially because, in Napster's case, the unrestricted sharing of music files on a global basis isn't just subverting their intellectual property rights, it's making lots and lots of money for the folks who propagated the scheme in the first place.

Chief among of whom, incidentally, is the decidedly un-Robin Hood-esque concern, Bertelsmann.

Bertelsmann, which is among the world's largest media monoliths and once was a party to the RIAA's suit against Napster, surprised many in the industry when it announced it was buying into the company late last year. Bertelsmann executives, predictably, used the occasion to paint the vast, multinational conglomerate as a visionary, one that would revolutionize the music industry's relationship with the Internet.

"The industry has not embraced the usage of file sharing. We, together with Napster, are going to change all that," crowed Andreas Schmidt, president and CEO of Bertelsmann's eCommerce Group. "Somebody had to step up to the plate and take the leadership position."